In the Presence of Another World, for downjune
Title: In the Presence of Another World
Author: indiachick
Recipient: downjune
Rating: PG-13 for language.
Warnings: none. Unless really wild speculation counts.
Spoiler Warning: for all episodes of season 8.
Word Count: ~7000
Summary: Their lives these days are reminiscent of grim sand-stained fairytales, and Dean would rather populate a greasy, noir suburbia-- Sam Winchester knows.
Author's Notes: Written for the prompt: Sam settles down somewhere, but Dean is restless.This is set after 8.23, and is probably the weirdest thing I could have written for this prompt. I was in an oddly fairytale mood. I hope you still like it, recipient! Many thanks to my betas- you know who you are, and you know you're rockstars. Title from the Blue Oyster Cult song of the same name.
Their lives these days are reminiscent of grim sand-stained fairytales, and Dean would rather populate a greasy, noir suburbia-- Sam Winchester knows.
There's no pie here, no crap cable spewing sexed up pseudo-medical shows, and in the past few months, he knows his brother must have shuddered over the memory of putting a tarp on the Impala at least a hundred times. He knows that the insularity of the desert bothers Dean, that their lack of language bothers him, that the Maghreb region was probably not on Dean's list of Places to See Before You Die.
He knows that Dean hates demons and that he hates working with them, although Sam hates the helplessness of their situation more than he hates demons. He knows that the monsters make Dean jittery, that he scrounges for American newspapers every time he's in town getting supplies, and that, whether he vocalizes it or not, he worries about Cas.
It's evident in the way he looks at every news article about strange things. How he spends hours trying to pick out possible trenchcoat-clad nerd-angels from the backgrounds of grainy photos.
Of course Dean denies it, claims that Cas is probably stuck in heaven with Metatron and playing Battleship. Or Monopoly, because Metatron seems more of a Monopoly guy.
When Sam presses the issue, Dean diverts his attention to other things, banal things. Slaps the newspaper down on the chipped worktable that sits in the middle of their room and fixes an unnerving, unblinking gaze on the page like he's going to laser-vision the sucker. Look, nuns freak out over an angel feather- and this one's actually kind of really hot, wimple and all. Weather is going mental over Wyoming. Here's something about Sioux Falls--too many sightings of angels there-- do you think that's connected to us?
Sam nods and joins in this new game, this game with only one rule. Even on the days he feels like screaming, even on the days the intensity of their weird situation builds-up to a crescendo and nothing Dean says helps anymore and he goes fucking crazy--even on those days he doesn't bring up the stuff that really sets Dean on edge.
Because this is what they do, this is what they've always done.
Hold each other up, through everything.
Now with everything changing, it becomes more important than ever.
Sam worries about their angel too. On the days when he has nothing to do except stare at the sandcastle's walls, run his eyes over the infinitely repeating Berber patterns in the mosaic, or play with the complex knots he makes on a length of rope to keep his anxiety at bay--on those days he thinks up complicated Cas-is-probably-just-fine scenarios that inevitably always end with the poor guy dead in a trench somewhere. He doesn't voice any of his theories. He doesn't think Dean wants to know why Sam thinks Cas is probably at the bottom of the Grand Canyon with a few dozen vultures for friends. Dean has enough on his plate at the moment. Metaphorically speaking.
“Damn it,” his brother curses, throwing the shovel down atop the red dirt, wiping the back of his hand over his sweaty brow. “I've hit rock. Again. Why are you making me dig a grave for a monster, Sam?”
“I liked Rowe.” Sam says, quietly, from his perch on top of a rock that's curiously shaped like a giant pissed-off fist. He nudges the enormous dead monster by his feet with a toe. “He was nice.”
“He was nice?” Dean's expression is bemused bordering on incredulous as he takes in the seven-foot, winged, clawed body that Sam is staring at. “He was nice?
Dude, have you been drinking the wrong Kool-Aid since we got here or what? You sound like a girl on the world's most vanilla date.”
“He was the one with the horrible oboe skills.”
“Really?” Dean looks to the sky in a display of earnest gratitude, “Well, thank God, then. It couldn't have been too long before I stuck that oboe down his freaking throat.”
“It's not funny, Dean. He helped plant the flowers,” mutters Sam. He barely makes sense even to himself, and by now, Dean doesn't even blink.
Overhead, the clouds stretch like some monstrous spiderweb hung from a fingernail moon. The sky is oddly ruddy, and there are no stars. All the stars have been secreted away to some safer place, and Sam wonders if it has been that way since the angels fell from heaven. He's never noticed it before, but now he tries to remember having seen any stars at all after that day. Now he tries and fails, and the world seems a little more darker, claustrophobic.
“Flowers,” grunts Dean, climbing out of the too-shallow grave that would never fit their nice monster. “Right. That's so important. Flowers. Sorry Sam, flowers or not, it's the Pit for this guy.”
“I don't like that place,” says Sam, quickly, too quickly, helplessly, almost like a switch has been flipped in him, and then he grits his teeth. Looks everywhere but at Dean, to the monochrome darkness on three sides, to the lantern-lit Ksar on one side.
Strange lights hover over the landscape at night, phosphorescent, inexplicable, casting ivory shadows over the red desert. It looks alien, a Martian wasteland, but there's too much life here. Beneath the rocks, behind them, under the sand. Ancient life, resistant to evolution, thriving despite scouring winds and a thousand ruthless suns. He feels the gaze of a thousand desert critters gauging them, the heat of the blood in their veins, and shudders at their lidless, primal interest.
“You don't have to come with, Sam.”
“I'm coming.”
He holds Dean's gaze squarely till his brother sighs, shakes his head and grabs the monster's head. “Take the bloody thing's feet then,” he says, rolling his eyes heavenward. “You'd think the monsters would get rid of their own, but no. We get to do their dirty work.”
“I don't think,” huffs Sam, as they hoist Rowe between them and maneuver him carefully down the path leading to the Pit, “that the monsters know what a burial is. They might just choose to eat him, Dean. He's big. He'd last for two whole meals. What the hell was in that mystery lunch meat today, anyway?”
“That's revolting, you freak, shut up.”
“Do you- do you hate it here, Dean?”
He just blurts it, without thinking. That's not usually like him. The patented Sam Winchester way is to consider. To deliberate and ponder and meditate and contemplate and excogitate. To dance around the issue, to poke it with a stick but from a distance, to bribe it into talking by employing the power of eyebrows or double cheeseburgers.
Sam is suddenly not sure if he wants the answer or not.
The world tilts, like a painting knocked askew. It's harder to breathe. The anxiety builds up in him and there is no rope to knot.
Dean stops walking. Just for a second. It's dark but not too dark for Sam to be unable to make out the rigid set of his jaw, the slight clench of his fists.
“Let's just get this thing to the Pit, okay?”
“Dean--”
“Some questions are like red-headed hookers and sushi, Sam. Best left alone.”
And with that pearl of dubious Dean Winchester wisdom, he grunts and tugs hard at the dead monster between them, forcing it and Sam along the dusty path towards the dark, reeking Pit.
OOO
Dean watches his brother nudge the monster into the Pit. For something so enormous, the monster is oddly silent as it falls. He's a bit familiar with this one. He's seen it on occasion, clutching an oboe and following Sam around like a mutated giant puppy on a leash, and Dean is a little sad to see it go.
Sam's expression is strange. He's not revolted by the stench of the Pit. He's not afraid of it, either, though that's a no-brainer. Nothing much scares them anymore. But his eyes are lit, bright with this newest brand of crazy he's acquired, and Dean keeps a hand on his brother's shirt. Just in case. Who knows what goes on in that gigantic head of his?
There's a platform of wood built above the Pit, and that's where they stand now. The planks are slowly rotting, but spell-work makes it certain that they won't have any unfortunate accidents. Below them, the darkness of the Pit spirals into nothingness. If he squints, Dean can make out a hand there, a head there, a giant pair of feelers over there. It's all very primitive, very exotic-horror-movie.
Add this postcard moment to Dean Winchester's Gigantic File of Weird: Sam and I, at the monster mass-burial site, somewhere in Maghreb.
“Why'd you name him Rowe, anyway?” he asks as they walk back towards the giant sandcastle that they call home now.
“Ah, it was random. He didn't have one,” Sam says.
“So you just gave him one?”
“Everything deserves a name, Dean. Even monsters.”
Dean snorts. “Is this a post Heaven-barfed-up-the-angels thing like the flowers, or just random Sam freakiness?”
Sam elbows him, smiling a little, but his thoughts are elsewhere. There are whole kingdoms inside his brother, some of them inaccessible even in the best of weather, but for once Dean knows exactly what he's thinking.
Do you hate it here, Dean?
Trouble is, Dean doesn't know. He doesn't see how it's a valid question, since they don't have a choice. He hates working with Crowley. Wishes he could go charging across America like he used to, Impala screaming mullet rock, Sammy in tow, giving hell to the angel-dicks working havoc there. He wants to know what happened to Cas, if the son of a bitch had messed it up again and was moping in some corner of the world. He doesn't care for the crumbling old sand palace built up straight out of the rock, or the hundred oddly-shaped monsters populating it. He doesn't like doing nothing while the angels walk the world. They might have lost their wings, and a significant amount of their mojo, but they aren't totally helpless. He knows their plans. He hates doing nothing to stop it.
Sometimes the restlessness is in his bones, gnawing. Other times it's just there in the background, a feeling of inadequacy, and he can't grasp it.
But there's something he'll have to leave behind if he gives in to the feeling and goes back to what he was, and he's not prepared for that.
He casts a sidelong glance at his brother.
He told Sam he wouldn't put anything above him, ever. He wasn't lying. He means that with every fiber of his being. But he would be lying if he said he didn't want to fall to his knees right now, beg to some higher power to let him be normal again, just let him be okay again, he stopped doing the freaking trials, he should be okay. He should be okay. Here's Sam, damaged and crazy and too fucking real, mostly even weirdly happy, and Dean doesn't know what to do. This stupid side-effect thing can't be permanent.
This, them being the fairytale keepers of some fairytale castle, can't be permanent.
He can't answer Sam. Not now. Not until they have a choice and hating here, hating this place, becomes an option.
“Dean.”
“Yeah, Sam?”
Sam looks at him like he wants to say something, lips parted, hair falling into his eyes. It's gotten so freaking long again. They're at the entrance to the Ksar, beneath the crumbling arch that sits, stark and brown and beautiful against the incredible sky. From within, Dean can hear clattering and hissing, chains and fire, high screaming laughter. Their monsters. It's like Monsters Inc, only gorier, and way less fluffier. Though Sam might disagree.
“I just,” starts Sam, and then cocks his head to the side like he's listening to something. “Nothing.”
“Are you sure?”
“Nothing. I'm fine. I'm going to, uh, the garden.”
“Hey. Hey,” Dean says, grabbing his brother's shirt to stop Sam from taking off. “Don't you want dinner?”
“Save some for me,” Sam says, twisting out of Dean's grip. He's kind of like a force of nature when he wants something these days, and Dean lets him go. Looks to the sky for a moment in mock-supplication, like I hope you're enjoying this, amen.
It's just him and the monsters then, one big family.
Good times.
OOO
After the angels started falling from the sky, Dean didn't waste too long before bundling Sam into the Impala. It was hard enough without Sam fighting him too, long arms flailing, shivering like he'd been electrocuted.
“What about Crowley?” Sam had gasped, and even then he was slightly off-balance, swiping at his clothes restlessly like he was trying to get rid of the rainwater that had soaked them both, pulling uneasily at the rag Dean had tied around his palm.
“Crowley isn't our biggest concern now, okay?” Dean had said, putting the car in reverse, unsure where to look. At the sky, lit up, the unpredicted meteor shower still on? At the angel climbing out of the river behind them? At Sam, shivering, gasping for breath, his fingers inching towards the door lock?
“Sammy, just stay in the fucking car, man, what are you doing?”
“I have to get out.”
“No, you don't. You--Sam? Sam, what the hell--”
He'd opened the door, but the Impala was still moving slow enough that he just stumbled out, fell to his knees. Dean cursed, stilled the car, and was out by Sam's side in seconds.
“I can't--,” wheezed Sam, his fists clenching into the mud, water dripping from the tips of hair strands. He was looking at his arms, his eyes very, very wide and unfocussed, the purple shadows under his eyes starker now, darker. “It burns , Dean! I have to go back in there, I have to finish--”
“You're not finishing anything. You're not! I thought we made that clear!”
“But it burns, Dean,” Sam said, quietly, desperately. And then he was screaming his head off and Dean wasn't going to get him to go anywhere with him except into the church--fine, then, into the church, he'd just put an angel blade in the guy who just walked out of the river on principle--and the shingles on the roof were all broken in there, water pooling everywhere, and the Devil's Trap holding Crowley in was broken. The bastard was just getting out of the handcuffs as Dean opened the door, but he had none of his swagger. He got out of the chair and fell, sat there gaping at Sam and Dean for a moment before he said, “What's wrong with Sam?”
“What, no animal metaphors, Crowley?” Dean snarled, his feet slipping on the floor, Sam sliding to the ground and staying there, curling up on himself, making agonized sounds.
“Professional…discussion,” the King of Hell gritted out.
Dean threw him a glare. “He's--I don't know, okay? He isn't glowing now, but--I don't know. Where the hell is Castiel?”
“Something's wrong outside…”
“Angels. By the thousands. They fell.”
“All of them.”
“All of them,” snapped Dean.
A thoughtful look came across Crowley's face. “Bet it's that angel of yours that messed up again. He's going to be so proud, the Big Daddy. I would run…if I were you.”
“Why? Why would we run?”
“Are you mad? You're the Winchesters! They'll want you. It's the California Gold Rush, and you two are the pay dirt. Think of what they can do with you. You could be bait for Cas,” Crowley said, standing up, still jelly-legged and red-eyed, slurring his words like he's drunk, drunk on Sam's blood in his veins, “Or hostages in exchange for the angel tablet, or they could just kill you on principle for starting this whole mess with Metatron. I…uh, I owe Sam here a debt, so I'll get you two out of here. I'll call the roundtable, you two just show up when I say it. Kapiché?”
Dean was in a motel room before he could reply. Since when did Crowley care about debts anyway?
For the next day and a half he waited there, stewing, watching Sam toss restlessly in his bed, scream, shout out weird things in some other language. His temperature shot up again, into the stratosphere, and his skin was actually turning red, like he was right, like he was burning. Mid-noon on the second day, Sam sat stark upright and stated, very lucidly, that it has to stop, stop right now.
“What, Sam? What has to stop?”
“You've to stop it, Dean,” he said, clutching blindly at the air till he found Dean, “Make it stop. The ringing. It's so loud. I can't think. They're panicking, they don't know what to do, they can't go home, Dean, they can't go home. They just want to go home!”
This last was a panicked, wrenching gasp, and was also accompanied by their sudden, very disconcerting transport to an actual roundtable.
“Damn it, Crowley, would it kill you to give us a warning?!”
Sam promptly fell off his chair and didn't get up. He looked wretched, eyes screwed shut, the backs of his eyelids a bruised purple.
“He's resonating. Not pleasant, not when it's with a thousand angels at the same time. And, his blood is actually boiling. It's the Grace. You should have figured that out by now, dimwit. I'll give him five hours or so before his brain liquefies.”
Dean gaped at the woman standing at the head of the table. A brunette bombshell, in a fitted jacket and leather pants, a string of rubies around her neck in a tight choker, like a precious slit throat. Her eyes were on Sam, and Dean didn't like the look on her face. Like something witchy finding something particularly delectable up for grabs.
“Crowley?”
“That's just offending, even for you, Dean,” Crowley said, from the other end of the table. “Necklace is a clue. This one's also a bit attached to her past. Lucifer this and Lucifer that, it's quite tiring.”
“Wait,” said Dean, incredulous. “You're Abbadon? What happened to the other meat-suit?”
“Ask your brother,” Abbadon barked a short laugh, taking a step towards Sam. Dean moved to block her way, Ruby's old knife at the ready.
“Keep the hormones under check, kids. We have a problem on our hands. Our winged friends aren't winged any more, but they're far from helpless. They're going to try and force the pearly gates open.”
“How?”
“Souls,” it was Sam who answered, head in his arms, rocking back and forth, “They're…harvesting. Souls.”
Dean looked at him, at Crowley, and back at Sam. “They're going to kill everyone?”
“No, no. Merely turn them all--what's that you say--ah, Terminator,” said Crowley, and when Dean looked at him blankly, “Soulless, okay? Sound familiar? And once they run out of earthly souls, guess where they'll look next?”
“Hell needs its souls,” quipped Abbadon, “Hell needs its humans. They'll launch a demonic genocide to grab the souls of our vessels as well. And we have no defense against them. Unless you two agree to something, sign the blank space, I save your brother from certain death, and we all go home happy. What do you say, Winchester?”
Dean smirked. “Wait. You two are like, together now? King and Queen bitches of Hell?”
“Don't look at me, I'm her bitch. She needs a guard-dog and I figure, hey, better than dying.”
Dean looked at them, at a bleary-eyed unfocussed Sam, and said, “I'm listening.”
OOO
Sam can't leave the Ksar. That's the price of the antidote that keeps the Grace in his blood from boiling him alive.
It was God's intention, Dean had told him later, the ultimate sacrifice. You would have died.
Died, of the Grace, of what shouldn't be in any human's blood. He wonders what it would have been like though. With the trial ended, the whole of the Grace in his blood, what would the world have looked like in his last moments? It's amazing as it is. The sharp clarity, the memories he gets by touching even inanimate objects like the walls, the tiny beating hearts of the little creatures that he can hear even from up here, on the roof of the Ksar. The way he can coax flowers to sprout from skulls, from malformed monster ribcages, a whole garden of bones and blooms. And the visions. Not death-visions like in his past, not visions of the future even, but the past. Sumerian cities and alluvial plains, Babylon and Alexandria, the Inundation of Ur and the burning of Sodom and Gomorrah. They steal over him, these visions, silking into his consciousness, sneaky and pervasive. Like a fever, or possession. He doesn't mind them. There's no point to them. It's not like he can jump up saying, “The cities are burning a million years in the past, Dean, we have to stop it!”
And then the anxiety; sometimes the blind, terrible panic. That's him, resonating with the angels. The collective mentality of the thousands of angels on this earth invades him and leaves him desperate to go home though he knows that it's not his own emotion; he's just a phantom limb hurting even when it isn't part of the body.
It sneaks out of his mouth sometimes even though he tries his best to hold it back.
“I want to go home.”
Dean understands what he means, the helplessness of the feeling, tells him this is home, Sammy, you ARE home. Sam believes him, because wherever they're together is home, it's always been that way.
It's Dean who gave him the rope to knot, Dean who first suggested that Sam take the rooftop and turn it into a garden. Focus on something. I would drink, but you're not me, and the stuff you get here will just knock you out anyway.
And in all honesty, this place is not half-bad. Nice monsters are nice. Sam has Dean. Dean goes stir-crazy but he stays. Sometimes there are chicken dinners.
Even Crowley is different. Abbadon locked him up here along with them, using his witchy powers to keep Sam alive, to brew him the antidote, but he doesn't seem to really mind. Better than being torn limb to limb, he says. Knights of Hell are powerful. And you're good entertainment, Moose. Did the Sumerians run around screaming when the flood happened, or did they just go quietly? He's almost jovial these days, like Sam's blood in his veins is some kind of euphoric trip.
Sam is not entirely sure what the purpose of the monsters are. Abbadon building her army, he guesses, biding her time before unleashing them on the angels. They're a varied sort. Some have wings. Some have too many appendages. All have claws. They're built from clay by over-imaginative local artisans. Brought to life by souls from Hell and Abbadon's spell, taken from Josie's head, belonging to the Men of Letters. The catch is the reason they're here: the spell requires the blood of someone from the Men of Letters, given willingly. They're legacies, after all.
A few drops of blood every day, in return for saving your brother's life. That's the deal Dean took. It isn't even a dark deal, because they're both actually not sure if the monster army isn't better than the angels, though they'd gank Abbadon if they get a chance. Still, not a bad deal at all, all things considered, at least not for Sam. Dean, though…
(Some questions are best left alone, Sam)
He stands atop the roof now, hands in the pockets of his jeans, at the very edge. The desert stretches in every direction, marred by a few towns here, a city in the distance. All the buildings are square, most have crenellations through which the sky appears, as if through punched holes. Around him, the garden of bones and blooms thrives with moths and beetles, their tiny hearts the only background score to the infinite silence.
Earlier, coming back from the Pit. What was that he heard?
Like a voice. It had cut Sam short, he was going to say something along the lines of “I'm sorry you're stuck here, Dean,” though he knows that Dean's just going to get pissed at him for even saying it. For suggesting, again, that it was Sam's fault they're stuck here. It's actually a relief to know that, to believe it. It's like a fucking mountain has been taken off his shoulders. It's like being able to breathe for the first time in a century.
He hadn't talked to Dean, because he'd heard something.
Now Sam casts his eyes all around, looking for movement.
He doesn't see anything. Maybe he imagined it. Maybe he brushed up against a wall and some memory, some hundred-year-old memory of someone who used to live in this tumbledown, derelict palace came up to him to say hullo. He looks to the west, at the Pit. Sometimes the monsters don't turn out right. They simply roll over and die, and they go into the Pit. Sometimes their souls still hang around above it and that bothers Sam because the souls are always confused about where their bodies are.
Reminds him too much of the Cage.
“Hullo,” he whispers into the darkness.
Sam?
“Yes,” he says, anxiety prickling at the back of his mind. “Yes, it's Sam.”
He looks again, eyes sweeping over the desert. Searching, searching, until he finally finds it. To the north, stumbling up the rocky path. A bolt of hot lightning illuminates the figure, just for a second.
“Dean!” yells Sam, already running. He knocks down a couple of the bone-sculptures in his hurry, and doesn't stop to right them. “Dean!”
He pushes through the heavy wooden door insulating him from the rest of the Ksar, and down the narrow steps, shouting for his brother all the way, until he finds Dean at the bottom of the stairs in the main hall, half-eaten dinner in his hand.
“What? Sammy, what?”
Sam doesn't stop to explain, he doesn't think he can explain, he just grabs Dean's jacket and yanks him out the door, into the icy desert night.
OOO
Dean doesn't know what's going on, except that he's racing down the path that leads to the bottom of the mountain with Sam. Sam is dragging him down it. He hopes this isn't some kind of mad sprint towards a phantom or a hallucination: they've already been through all that shit once, and Dean doesn't think he can stand to--
“Cas?!”
What? “Sam, what's -”
“Castiel!”
Sam lets go of Dean and runs a few more steps, then drops to his knees on the ground. Dean follows him, wary, unwilling to hope, sure that this is just Sam's crazy acting up.
But the crazy person is right this time. It's their angel.
“Fuck.” Dean fumbles in his jacket and produces a flashlight.
“Angel down,” mutters Sam, looking up at Dean. In the narrow light beam, he looks like he's going to flip out.
“Angel down,” Dean agrees, as the light illuminates Cas, his tattered trench-coat and bruised face, his bare and bloodied feet. His eyes are closed. Dean's mind starts working at warp-speed then, throwing explanations at him, reasons, motivations. He grits his teeth, tries to stop his heart from going a hundred miles a second. “Cas? Castiel, can you hear me, man?”
“No ringing, no angel,” says Sam, speculatively, “Why does it not ring, Dean?”
He clenches his fist, wrings his arms, looks longingly back at the Ksar. Dean can tell that this is probably too much for him. The Grace isn't killing him anymore, but the continuous visions, the thing he has with the walls and the stones and the memories attached to them, and the panic attacks--it's overwhelming. He can't add Cas to the equation without falling apart.
“Dude, I need you to hold on just a while longer.”
“Yeah. Yeah, okay. I'm fine,” Sam lets out his breath in a whoosh. “We need to take him inside.”
“What did he do,” Dean wonders, as they carry Cas up the path, “walk all the way?”
OOO
In the end, it's Sam who actually keeps it together.
Down in the courtyard, the monsters sense the newcomer and makes a ruckus. It's an unholy orchestra of growling and screeching, sibilant hissing, and Dean can barely hear his own thoughts over the melee.
“I'm going to go,” says Sam, soon as they get Cas to their room, “quiet them down.”
And miraculously, a few minutes later, the noise dies down. Dean doesn't even get it. All those weird, crazy malformed things loves Sammy. They sense his bad days and tones down their volume accordingly. They listen to him. They help him plant flowers. He gives them names. Dean just doesn't get it.
And then Sam comes back and upends half a pitcher of water over Castiel, and Dean, who's been standing there blinking at the angel's inert form, lets out a startled, “Sam!” . His brother just shrugs as Cas splutters and gasps. He sits up, wincing as he places weight on his skinned palms.
“You dumb son of a bitch, what did you do to yourself?!” It's Sam who asks the question, jovially, as if he's talking to a child that's just climbed out of a mud pond.
“There was a plane,” Cas says, his eyes flitting to a glowering Dean for a second before he peers at Sam, “and it crashed, and… you're all wrong, Sam. You heard me. Before. I heard you.”
Dean waves a frustrated arm and moves to eclipse Sam. “Okay, that's great and all--you guys can have your Shining moment later, can we please get to business?”
Cas looks at him, rubs at a bruise on his cheek. “What do you want to know, Dean?”
Dean snorts. “Okay, then. How about, everything? Start at this, man, where the hell have you been? And I swear to God, if you say you were chumming with Metatron up in the Pearlies…”
“I was not chumming with Metatron up in Heaven, Metatron doesn't need friends, Dean, Metatron doesn't need anyone--”
“Then where? Trick-or-treating human souls? Trying to get the gates open again? 'Cause I put a hunter APB on you before we came here, told every fucking guy I know to keep a look out for you, and it's been four months since anyone's seen you,” says Dean, slamming a hand on the table. His head rings with questions, anger and concern battles for dominion in his head, and he wants to break something.
“I have a price on my head, Dean,” says Castiel, his voice dangerously low, “I was lying low. And looking for you. In case you haven't realized it, the two of you have been difficult to find!”
“How did you find us anyway?” asks Sam, his tone mollifying.
Cas's eyes narrow as he looks at Sam. “There was- an equation. I may be human now, but I still have my memories. It took a while to compute, there were a few surds that wouldn't cancel out, and one logarithm that took a week, but I was able to figure out the general vicinity of your souls-”
“You're human now?” snaps Dean, throwing Sam a don't make him start look.
“Yes, Metatron took my Grace. That was- that was the last part of the spell.”
“The spell that broke heaven,” Dean states, coldly, hands fisting over his knees.
Cas sighs. “Yes, Dean, the spell that broke heaven. I didn't know. I was trying to fix it.”
Dean smiles, deprecatively. “Jeez, Cas. Maybe you should stop trying to fix anything, seeing as all you end up doing is break it.”
Silence, of the barbed, electric kind, but then Cas says, “I know you're angry with me, Dean. But I need your help.”
“Help with what?” snaps Dean. “Because the last time you asked for my help--”
Cas takes a deep breath and cuts him short. “I know how to get into heaven, Dean. But I need both of you to help me open a portal.”
OOO
“These flowers,” Castiel says, making Sam jump and wince. “They're not normal.”
Sam looks at them. They're a deep shade of orange, with veins of a deep cobalt blue running through the petals. “No,” he says, simply, pushing his hair away from his eyes. Cas stands at the door, and Sam thinks he looks like he went twelve rounds with a freight train.
“But you like it here.”
Sam sits down at the edge of the roof, and Castiel follows suit. “I guess. It's nice enough. It's far from crowds, so there's less chance of me running into an angel.”
“What happens if you do?”
Sam makes a face. “Well, it's kind of like bells, you know. Loud, annoying, ridiculous. The way angels are in general. And then I feel like…like I want to go home. Like I've been uprooted from something I took for granted all these years, and like I'll die a thousand times to regain it. Like I'd give anything for it. Everything.”
Cas looks out into the darkness, saying nothing. Sam wonders at him, at the screeching grey panic he's reining in, and smiles, introspective. “Funny thing is that it's so human. That feeling. Sometimes I think that's exactly how Dean feels too. It's silly, isn't it? Missing a different sky. Missing different stars. Thinking they were probably better aligned back home. Missing a car, and greasy burger joints, and an underground bunker with spiders in the walls. Home is all that everyone wants.”
Cas meets his eyes. “If you go back home though, you'll never stop running, Sam. They're looking for you. Dean told me about the deal you took with Abbadon. She won't be very happy if you break it.”
Sam studies him, intently. “And if your plan works, and you get into heaven, it's probably suicide. But you still want to try, don't you, Cas? For your brothers and sisters. For family. You'll try to make it work.”
Castiel looks at Sam's flowers, at the bleached bones they crush as they grow. At the secret growing in their cobalt-blue veined orange petals, nearly ready to spill.
“Wouldn't anyone?” he mutters, and Sam smiles.
OOO
A slash in the sky.
That's what the portal is, much like the one in Purgatory though not glowy yet, and it's barely the span of an angel's wing.
Cas says he can't explain what it's doing in that particular geographic location without going into the metaphysical nature of String Theory, or some bullshit like that. Sam says he thinks there are portals all over, that Castiel was just trying to find them before he went ahead with his plan. Dean refuses to say anything about any of this because he's sure his brain is likely to explode from all that he's doing, all that he's not doing, and all the crap other supernatural pieces of crap are doing to his world.
The three of them stand atop the ruins of an old castle. This region is studded with these buildings, these echoes of multicolored pasts, and all of them resonate with memories that refuse to be obliterated with time.
The wind is strong, dusty; it blows Sam's hair around his face like he's in page two-hundred of some Mills and Boons novel. Dean smirks even through the nervousness that all this brings. He looks at his brother and Cas, looking over the spell now, going through the finer aspects of Enochian pronunciation. He fingers the angel blade in his jacket, and heaves a sigh.
Sam turns to him. “The ambergris, Dean,” he says.
Dean hands him the bag of intestinal whale glop. The spell requires strange ingredients, but this is a strange land. A land that believes in magic, in demons, with no past grief or present proof necessary. It wasn't too hard gathering up myrrh, vetiver or the Five Herbs of Conflict.
He lights a match and drops it into the silver bowl that Sam holds out.
“Heaven is hard to navigate, but you already know that. Have to find the yellow-brick road and all, as your saying goes,” says Cas, with a faltering half-smile. “I'm human now, I can slip in through here without Metatron noticing it, unlike the other angels who kept their Grace when they fell, but I can't guarantee that I'll slip out. But I'll try. If I don't find him in two months, I'll try and get out,” Cas pauses, and then says, in a quiet voice, “I'm trying to make things right. Sometimes it doesn't look like it, but that's all I'm trying to do, Dean.”
Dean watches him, unblinking. “Are you sure about this, Cas? I'm all for action too, but there are holes of such size in your plan that the Impala can drive through them, and from where I am, all this looks like is suicide.”
Cas gives a half-shrug. “I need to do this because of the same reason Sam got Lucifer to jump into the Cage. The same reason you never stopped trying to get out of Purgatory. Because I have to, Dean. There's no other way.”
“Then maybe you should hold onto this.”
Castiel takes the angel blade from him. The sun glints off it, glints on all their faces. Dean looks away.
Sam gets the Enochian right in one go, and stands back as the wind gets stronger. It howls around them all, and then the actual slash appears in the sky, a seam tearing open and light flooding through.
Dean stumbles back as a pillar of light falls onto the rooftop, keeping one hand on Sam's jacket, the other pressed against his brow to shield his eyes from the light. Cas steps into the pillar of light, and through the last few words that Sam speaks, through the hiss and crackle of the lilac flame dying in the bowl in his hand, through the screaming wind, Dean thinks he hears Cas say, “In two months. Look for me in Vermont.”
And then he's gone, the light sucked away, the seam in the sky re-stitching itself into the clear cornflower blue of the Middle East.
OOO
Sam is gone the moment they arrive back, into the sheltered comfort of his garden, and Dean watches a few monsters jabber among themselves for some time--it's entertaining enough-- before he starts wondering about Vermont.
About how Sam, a step in front of him, had nodded without question or confusion.
He climbs the stairs, goes first to their room where he finds John Winchester's journal on his bed. It's been touched recently, the clip holding it together placed higher, a pen wedged between two pages near the end. Where he'd written down Abbadon's spell to open portals to far places (with “beats flights” in the margin)--the same one, in fact, that Henry had used to come to their time, except modified to lead them here--Sam has added something extra in his hand.
More Enochian.
Dean closes the journal and makes his way to the garden.
Sam doesn't seem surprised to see him. In fact, even before Dean actually pushes open the door, he hears Sam say, “Dean, come in here and look.”
The garden is glowing. Dean's taken aback for a moment, because glowing flowers, what the hell but then he sees the color, the gleam, and it's cobalt blue. And it drips. Like ink, over the edges of the petals, into tiny bottles.
“I figured,” says Sam, “that I could try and brew the antidote myself. Apparently I have a green touch.”
“Your antidote is made from bone-fed flowers? Seriously?”
“It's a spell and every spell has ingredients, Dean. You sow the right seed, you reap the right crop.”
“And the Enochian in here?” asks Dean, raising John's journal.
“That was Castiel. Gave me the shortest route to Vermont.”
Dean swallows. Looks at the flowers, at the bottles, at his brother. The ache in his chest is probably a combination of two things: the fact that Sam had been trying, all along, trying so hard even though Dean knew he'd kind of settled down to the easy routine of this, and something else, something that flickers, something that prods at the back of his mind without him being able to quite grasp what it is.
“I really don't hate it here that much, Sammy. It's…fine.”
“You wouldn't want to go back home if you had the chance?” asks Sam, feverishly, a grin sparking at his lips. “I can do this, Dean. Screw Abbadon, she has enough monsters. If she comes after us, she's just another problem. Don't tell me you don't wanna take the tarp off the Impala and make it harder on the angels.”
It's like something in Dean breaks, or maybe something thaws, and he thinks the roiling, flickering feeling that he can't name must be hope?
“I do, you know I do, hell, I'd give my soul to grab a fucking beer with you when I feel like it, drive a little over the limit and play REO Speedwagon when I'm in the mood, but--”
“This is the way out, Dean. This is one problem I can make disappear. No easy fix-its that'll come back to bite, no double-edged crap hanging over our heads. This is something I figured out, something that I can do. I can handle the past-visions and the memory thing, I'll wear earmuffs to tune out the ringing if I have to. Maybe this, this could even be a good thing. You just let me do this, Dean, for both of us. Let me get us home.”
Dean feels like they're at the cusp of something important: the road back to the easy, beautiful familial sameness that feels like it has been lost for years. So much that passes between them is unsaid, has always been, but in this silence is a new kind of peace.
Dean says, “Dude, I'll have to play my tunes extra loud to drown out your crazy.”
Sam shrugs, looks at the brown expanse around them and says, wistfully, “I hope we have a white Christmas.”
Author: indiachick
Recipient: downjune
Rating: PG-13 for language.
Warnings: none. Unless really wild speculation counts.
Spoiler Warning: for all episodes of season 8.
Word Count: ~7000
Summary: Their lives these days are reminiscent of grim sand-stained fairytales, and Dean would rather populate a greasy, noir suburbia-- Sam Winchester knows.
Author's Notes: Written for the prompt: Sam settles down somewhere, but Dean is restless.This is set after 8.23, and is probably the weirdest thing I could have written for this prompt. I was in an oddly fairytale mood. I hope you still like it, recipient! Many thanks to my betas- you know who you are, and you know you're rockstars. Title from the Blue Oyster Cult song of the same name.
Their lives these days are reminiscent of grim sand-stained fairytales, and Dean would rather populate a greasy, noir suburbia-- Sam Winchester knows.
There's no pie here, no crap cable spewing sexed up pseudo-medical shows, and in the past few months, he knows his brother must have shuddered over the memory of putting a tarp on the Impala at least a hundred times. He knows that the insularity of the desert bothers Dean, that their lack of language bothers him, that the Maghreb region was probably not on Dean's list of Places to See Before You Die.
He knows that Dean hates demons and that he hates working with them, although Sam hates the helplessness of their situation more than he hates demons. He knows that the monsters make Dean jittery, that he scrounges for American newspapers every time he's in town getting supplies, and that, whether he vocalizes it or not, he worries about Cas.
It's evident in the way he looks at every news article about strange things. How he spends hours trying to pick out possible trenchcoat-clad nerd-angels from the backgrounds of grainy photos.
Of course Dean denies it, claims that Cas is probably stuck in heaven with Metatron and playing Battleship. Or Monopoly, because Metatron seems more of a Monopoly guy.
When Sam presses the issue, Dean diverts his attention to other things, banal things. Slaps the newspaper down on the chipped worktable that sits in the middle of their room and fixes an unnerving, unblinking gaze on the page like he's going to laser-vision the sucker. Look, nuns freak out over an angel feather- and this one's actually kind of really hot, wimple and all. Weather is going mental over Wyoming. Here's something about Sioux Falls--too many sightings of angels there-- do you think that's connected to us?
Sam nods and joins in this new game, this game with only one rule. Even on the days he feels like screaming, even on the days the intensity of their weird situation builds-up to a crescendo and nothing Dean says helps anymore and he goes fucking crazy--even on those days he doesn't bring up the stuff that really sets Dean on edge.
Because this is what they do, this is what they've always done.
Hold each other up, through everything.
Now with everything changing, it becomes more important than ever.
Sam worries about their angel too. On the days when he has nothing to do except stare at the sandcastle's walls, run his eyes over the infinitely repeating Berber patterns in the mosaic, or play with the complex knots he makes on a length of rope to keep his anxiety at bay--on those days he thinks up complicated Cas-is-probably-just-fine scenarios that inevitably always end with the poor guy dead in a trench somewhere. He doesn't voice any of his theories. He doesn't think Dean wants to know why Sam thinks Cas is probably at the bottom of the Grand Canyon with a few dozen vultures for friends. Dean has enough on his plate at the moment. Metaphorically speaking.
“Damn it,” his brother curses, throwing the shovel down atop the red dirt, wiping the back of his hand over his sweaty brow. “I've hit rock. Again. Why are you making me dig a grave for a monster, Sam?”
“I liked Rowe.” Sam says, quietly, from his perch on top of a rock that's curiously shaped like a giant pissed-off fist. He nudges the enormous dead monster by his feet with a toe. “He was nice.”
“He was nice?” Dean's expression is bemused bordering on incredulous as he takes in the seven-foot, winged, clawed body that Sam is staring at. “He was nice?
Dude, have you been drinking the wrong Kool-Aid since we got here or what? You sound like a girl on the world's most vanilla date.”
“He was the one with the horrible oboe skills.”
“Really?” Dean looks to the sky in a display of earnest gratitude, “Well, thank God, then. It couldn't have been too long before I stuck that oboe down his freaking throat.”
“It's not funny, Dean. He helped plant the flowers,” mutters Sam. He barely makes sense even to himself, and by now, Dean doesn't even blink.
Overhead, the clouds stretch like some monstrous spiderweb hung from a fingernail moon. The sky is oddly ruddy, and there are no stars. All the stars have been secreted away to some safer place, and Sam wonders if it has been that way since the angels fell from heaven. He's never noticed it before, but now he tries to remember having seen any stars at all after that day. Now he tries and fails, and the world seems a little more darker, claustrophobic.
“Flowers,” grunts Dean, climbing out of the too-shallow grave that would never fit their nice monster. “Right. That's so important. Flowers. Sorry Sam, flowers or not, it's the Pit for this guy.”
“I don't like that place,” says Sam, quickly, too quickly, helplessly, almost like a switch has been flipped in him, and then he grits his teeth. Looks everywhere but at Dean, to the monochrome darkness on three sides, to the lantern-lit Ksar on one side.
Strange lights hover over the landscape at night, phosphorescent, inexplicable, casting ivory shadows over the red desert. It looks alien, a Martian wasteland, but there's too much life here. Beneath the rocks, behind them, under the sand. Ancient life, resistant to evolution, thriving despite scouring winds and a thousand ruthless suns. He feels the gaze of a thousand desert critters gauging them, the heat of the blood in their veins, and shudders at their lidless, primal interest.
“You don't have to come with, Sam.”
“I'm coming.”
He holds Dean's gaze squarely till his brother sighs, shakes his head and grabs the monster's head. “Take the bloody thing's feet then,” he says, rolling his eyes heavenward. “You'd think the monsters would get rid of their own, but no. We get to do their dirty work.”
“I don't think,” huffs Sam, as they hoist Rowe between them and maneuver him carefully down the path leading to the Pit, “that the monsters know what a burial is. They might just choose to eat him, Dean. He's big. He'd last for two whole meals. What the hell was in that mystery lunch meat today, anyway?”
“That's revolting, you freak, shut up.”
“Do you- do you hate it here, Dean?”
He just blurts it, without thinking. That's not usually like him. The patented Sam Winchester way is to consider. To deliberate and ponder and meditate and contemplate and excogitate. To dance around the issue, to poke it with a stick but from a distance, to bribe it into talking by employing the power of eyebrows or double cheeseburgers.
Sam is suddenly not sure if he wants the answer or not.
The world tilts, like a painting knocked askew. It's harder to breathe. The anxiety builds up in him and there is no rope to knot.
Dean stops walking. Just for a second. It's dark but not too dark for Sam to be unable to make out the rigid set of his jaw, the slight clench of his fists.
“Let's just get this thing to the Pit, okay?”
“Dean--”
“Some questions are like red-headed hookers and sushi, Sam. Best left alone.”
And with that pearl of dubious Dean Winchester wisdom, he grunts and tugs hard at the dead monster between them, forcing it and Sam along the dusty path towards the dark, reeking Pit.
OOO
Dean watches his brother nudge the monster into the Pit. For something so enormous, the monster is oddly silent as it falls. He's a bit familiar with this one. He's seen it on occasion, clutching an oboe and following Sam around like a mutated giant puppy on a leash, and Dean is a little sad to see it go.
Sam's expression is strange. He's not revolted by the stench of the Pit. He's not afraid of it, either, though that's a no-brainer. Nothing much scares them anymore. But his eyes are lit, bright with this newest brand of crazy he's acquired, and Dean keeps a hand on his brother's shirt. Just in case. Who knows what goes on in that gigantic head of his?
There's a platform of wood built above the Pit, and that's where they stand now. The planks are slowly rotting, but spell-work makes it certain that they won't have any unfortunate accidents. Below them, the darkness of the Pit spirals into nothingness. If he squints, Dean can make out a hand there, a head there, a giant pair of feelers over there. It's all very primitive, very exotic-horror-movie.
Add this postcard moment to Dean Winchester's Gigantic File of Weird: Sam and I, at the monster mass-burial site, somewhere in Maghreb.
“Why'd you name him Rowe, anyway?” he asks as they walk back towards the giant sandcastle that they call home now.
“Ah, it was random. He didn't have one,” Sam says.
“So you just gave him one?”
“Everything deserves a name, Dean. Even monsters.”
Dean snorts. “Is this a post Heaven-barfed-up-the-angels thing like the flowers, or just random Sam freakiness?”
Sam elbows him, smiling a little, but his thoughts are elsewhere. There are whole kingdoms inside his brother, some of them inaccessible even in the best of weather, but for once Dean knows exactly what he's thinking.
Do you hate it here, Dean?
Trouble is, Dean doesn't know. He doesn't see how it's a valid question, since they don't have a choice. He hates working with Crowley. Wishes he could go charging across America like he used to, Impala screaming mullet rock, Sammy in tow, giving hell to the angel-dicks working havoc there. He wants to know what happened to Cas, if the son of a bitch had messed it up again and was moping in some corner of the world. He doesn't care for the crumbling old sand palace built up straight out of the rock, or the hundred oddly-shaped monsters populating it. He doesn't like doing nothing while the angels walk the world. They might have lost their wings, and a significant amount of their mojo, but they aren't totally helpless. He knows their plans. He hates doing nothing to stop it.
Sometimes the restlessness is in his bones, gnawing. Other times it's just there in the background, a feeling of inadequacy, and he can't grasp it.
But there's something he'll have to leave behind if he gives in to the feeling and goes back to what he was, and he's not prepared for that.
He casts a sidelong glance at his brother.
He told Sam he wouldn't put anything above him, ever. He wasn't lying. He means that with every fiber of his being. But he would be lying if he said he didn't want to fall to his knees right now, beg to some higher power to let him be normal again, just let him be okay again, he stopped doing the freaking trials, he should be okay. He should be okay. Here's Sam, damaged and crazy and too fucking real, mostly even weirdly happy, and Dean doesn't know what to do. This stupid side-effect thing can't be permanent.
This, them being the fairytale keepers of some fairytale castle, can't be permanent.
He can't answer Sam. Not now. Not until they have a choice and hating here, hating this place, becomes an option.
“Dean.”
“Yeah, Sam?”
Sam looks at him like he wants to say something, lips parted, hair falling into his eyes. It's gotten so freaking long again. They're at the entrance to the Ksar, beneath the crumbling arch that sits, stark and brown and beautiful against the incredible sky. From within, Dean can hear clattering and hissing, chains and fire, high screaming laughter. Their monsters. It's like Monsters Inc, only gorier, and way less fluffier. Though Sam might disagree.
“I just,” starts Sam, and then cocks his head to the side like he's listening to something. “Nothing.”
“Are you sure?”
“Nothing. I'm fine. I'm going to, uh, the garden.”
“Hey. Hey,” Dean says, grabbing his brother's shirt to stop Sam from taking off. “Don't you want dinner?”
“Save some for me,” Sam says, twisting out of Dean's grip. He's kind of like a force of nature when he wants something these days, and Dean lets him go. Looks to the sky for a moment in mock-supplication, like I hope you're enjoying this, amen.
It's just him and the monsters then, one big family.
Good times.
OOO
After the angels started falling from the sky, Dean didn't waste too long before bundling Sam into the Impala. It was hard enough without Sam fighting him too, long arms flailing, shivering like he'd been electrocuted.
“What about Crowley?” Sam had gasped, and even then he was slightly off-balance, swiping at his clothes restlessly like he was trying to get rid of the rainwater that had soaked them both, pulling uneasily at the rag Dean had tied around his palm.
“Crowley isn't our biggest concern now, okay?” Dean had said, putting the car in reverse, unsure where to look. At the sky, lit up, the unpredicted meteor shower still on? At the angel climbing out of the river behind them? At Sam, shivering, gasping for breath, his fingers inching towards the door lock?
“Sammy, just stay in the fucking car, man, what are you doing?”
“I have to get out.”
“No, you don't. You--Sam? Sam, what the hell--”
He'd opened the door, but the Impala was still moving slow enough that he just stumbled out, fell to his knees. Dean cursed, stilled the car, and was out by Sam's side in seconds.
“I can't--,” wheezed Sam, his fists clenching into the mud, water dripping from the tips of hair strands. He was looking at his arms, his eyes very, very wide and unfocussed, the purple shadows under his eyes starker now, darker. “It burns , Dean! I have to go back in there, I have to finish--”
“You're not finishing anything. You're not! I thought we made that clear!”
“But it burns, Dean,” Sam said, quietly, desperately. And then he was screaming his head off and Dean wasn't going to get him to go anywhere with him except into the church--fine, then, into the church, he'd just put an angel blade in the guy who just walked out of the river on principle--and the shingles on the roof were all broken in there, water pooling everywhere, and the Devil's Trap holding Crowley in was broken. The bastard was just getting out of the handcuffs as Dean opened the door, but he had none of his swagger. He got out of the chair and fell, sat there gaping at Sam and Dean for a moment before he said, “What's wrong with Sam?”
“What, no animal metaphors, Crowley?” Dean snarled, his feet slipping on the floor, Sam sliding to the ground and staying there, curling up on himself, making agonized sounds.
“Professional…discussion,” the King of Hell gritted out.
Dean threw him a glare. “He's--I don't know, okay? He isn't glowing now, but--I don't know. Where the hell is Castiel?”
“Something's wrong outside…”
“Angels. By the thousands. They fell.”
“All of them.”
“All of them,” snapped Dean.
A thoughtful look came across Crowley's face. “Bet it's that angel of yours that messed up again. He's going to be so proud, the Big Daddy. I would run…if I were you.”
“Why? Why would we run?”
“Are you mad? You're the Winchesters! They'll want you. It's the California Gold Rush, and you two are the pay dirt. Think of what they can do with you. You could be bait for Cas,” Crowley said, standing up, still jelly-legged and red-eyed, slurring his words like he's drunk, drunk on Sam's blood in his veins, “Or hostages in exchange for the angel tablet, or they could just kill you on principle for starting this whole mess with Metatron. I…uh, I owe Sam here a debt, so I'll get you two out of here. I'll call the roundtable, you two just show up when I say it. Kapiché?”
Dean was in a motel room before he could reply. Since when did Crowley care about debts anyway?
For the next day and a half he waited there, stewing, watching Sam toss restlessly in his bed, scream, shout out weird things in some other language. His temperature shot up again, into the stratosphere, and his skin was actually turning red, like he was right, like he was burning. Mid-noon on the second day, Sam sat stark upright and stated, very lucidly, that it has to stop, stop right now.
“What, Sam? What has to stop?”
“You've to stop it, Dean,” he said, clutching blindly at the air till he found Dean, “Make it stop. The ringing. It's so loud. I can't think. They're panicking, they don't know what to do, they can't go home, Dean, they can't go home. They just want to go home!”
This last was a panicked, wrenching gasp, and was also accompanied by their sudden, very disconcerting transport to an actual roundtable.
“Damn it, Crowley, would it kill you to give us a warning?!”
Sam promptly fell off his chair and didn't get up. He looked wretched, eyes screwed shut, the backs of his eyelids a bruised purple.
“He's resonating. Not pleasant, not when it's with a thousand angels at the same time. And, his blood is actually boiling. It's the Grace. You should have figured that out by now, dimwit. I'll give him five hours or so before his brain liquefies.”
Dean gaped at the woman standing at the head of the table. A brunette bombshell, in a fitted jacket and leather pants, a string of rubies around her neck in a tight choker, like a precious slit throat. Her eyes were on Sam, and Dean didn't like the look on her face. Like something witchy finding something particularly delectable up for grabs.
“Crowley?”
“That's just offending, even for you, Dean,” Crowley said, from the other end of the table. “Necklace is a clue. This one's also a bit attached to her past. Lucifer this and Lucifer that, it's quite tiring.”
“Wait,” said Dean, incredulous. “You're Abbadon? What happened to the other meat-suit?”
“Ask your brother,” Abbadon barked a short laugh, taking a step towards Sam. Dean moved to block her way, Ruby's old knife at the ready.
“Keep the hormones under check, kids. We have a problem on our hands. Our winged friends aren't winged any more, but they're far from helpless. They're going to try and force the pearly gates open.”
“How?”
“Souls,” it was Sam who answered, head in his arms, rocking back and forth, “They're…harvesting. Souls.”
Dean looked at him, at Crowley, and back at Sam. “They're going to kill everyone?”
“No, no. Merely turn them all--what's that you say--ah, Terminator,” said Crowley, and when Dean looked at him blankly, “Soulless, okay? Sound familiar? And once they run out of earthly souls, guess where they'll look next?”
“Hell needs its souls,” quipped Abbadon, “Hell needs its humans. They'll launch a demonic genocide to grab the souls of our vessels as well. And we have no defense against them. Unless you two agree to something, sign the blank space, I save your brother from certain death, and we all go home happy. What do you say, Winchester?”
Dean smirked. “Wait. You two are like, together now? King and Queen bitches of Hell?”
“Don't look at me, I'm her bitch. She needs a guard-dog and I figure, hey, better than dying.”
Dean looked at them, at a bleary-eyed unfocussed Sam, and said, “I'm listening.”
OOO
Sam can't leave the Ksar. That's the price of the antidote that keeps the Grace in his blood from boiling him alive.
It was God's intention, Dean had told him later, the ultimate sacrifice. You would have died.
Died, of the Grace, of what shouldn't be in any human's blood. He wonders what it would have been like though. With the trial ended, the whole of the Grace in his blood, what would the world have looked like in his last moments? It's amazing as it is. The sharp clarity, the memories he gets by touching even inanimate objects like the walls, the tiny beating hearts of the little creatures that he can hear even from up here, on the roof of the Ksar. The way he can coax flowers to sprout from skulls, from malformed monster ribcages, a whole garden of bones and blooms. And the visions. Not death-visions like in his past, not visions of the future even, but the past. Sumerian cities and alluvial plains, Babylon and Alexandria, the Inundation of Ur and the burning of Sodom and Gomorrah. They steal over him, these visions, silking into his consciousness, sneaky and pervasive. Like a fever, or possession. He doesn't mind them. There's no point to them. It's not like he can jump up saying, “The cities are burning a million years in the past, Dean, we have to stop it!”
And then the anxiety; sometimes the blind, terrible panic. That's him, resonating with the angels. The collective mentality of the thousands of angels on this earth invades him and leaves him desperate to go home though he knows that it's not his own emotion; he's just a phantom limb hurting even when it isn't part of the body.
It sneaks out of his mouth sometimes even though he tries his best to hold it back.
“I want to go home.”
Dean understands what he means, the helplessness of the feeling, tells him this is home, Sammy, you ARE home. Sam believes him, because wherever they're together is home, it's always been that way.
It's Dean who gave him the rope to knot, Dean who first suggested that Sam take the rooftop and turn it into a garden. Focus on something. I would drink, but you're not me, and the stuff you get here will just knock you out anyway.
And in all honesty, this place is not half-bad. Nice monsters are nice. Sam has Dean. Dean goes stir-crazy but he stays. Sometimes there are chicken dinners.
Even Crowley is different. Abbadon locked him up here along with them, using his witchy powers to keep Sam alive, to brew him the antidote, but he doesn't seem to really mind. Better than being torn limb to limb, he says. Knights of Hell are powerful. And you're good entertainment, Moose. Did the Sumerians run around screaming when the flood happened, or did they just go quietly? He's almost jovial these days, like Sam's blood in his veins is some kind of euphoric trip.
Sam is not entirely sure what the purpose of the monsters are. Abbadon building her army, he guesses, biding her time before unleashing them on the angels. They're a varied sort. Some have wings. Some have too many appendages. All have claws. They're built from clay by over-imaginative local artisans. Brought to life by souls from Hell and Abbadon's spell, taken from Josie's head, belonging to the Men of Letters. The catch is the reason they're here: the spell requires the blood of someone from the Men of Letters, given willingly. They're legacies, after all.
A few drops of blood every day, in return for saving your brother's life. That's the deal Dean took. It isn't even a dark deal, because they're both actually not sure if the monster army isn't better than the angels, though they'd gank Abbadon if they get a chance. Still, not a bad deal at all, all things considered, at least not for Sam. Dean, though…
(Some questions are best left alone, Sam)
He stands atop the roof now, hands in the pockets of his jeans, at the very edge. The desert stretches in every direction, marred by a few towns here, a city in the distance. All the buildings are square, most have crenellations through which the sky appears, as if through punched holes. Around him, the garden of bones and blooms thrives with moths and beetles, their tiny hearts the only background score to the infinite silence.
Earlier, coming back from the Pit. What was that he heard?
Like a voice. It had cut Sam short, he was going to say something along the lines of “I'm sorry you're stuck here, Dean,” though he knows that Dean's just going to get pissed at him for even saying it. For suggesting, again, that it was Sam's fault they're stuck here. It's actually a relief to know that, to believe it. It's like a fucking mountain has been taken off his shoulders. It's like being able to breathe for the first time in a century.
He hadn't talked to Dean, because he'd heard something.
Now Sam casts his eyes all around, looking for movement.
He doesn't see anything. Maybe he imagined it. Maybe he brushed up against a wall and some memory, some hundred-year-old memory of someone who used to live in this tumbledown, derelict palace came up to him to say hullo. He looks to the west, at the Pit. Sometimes the monsters don't turn out right. They simply roll over and die, and they go into the Pit. Sometimes their souls still hang around above it and that bothers Sam because the souls are always confused about where their bodies are.
Reminds him too much of the Cage.
“Hullo,” he whispers into the darkness.
Sam?
“Yes,” he says, anxiety prickling at the back of his mind. “Yes, it's Sam.”
He looks again, eyes sweeping over the desert. Searching, searching, until he finally finds it. To the north, stumbling up the rocky path. A bolt of hot lightning illuminates the figure, just for a second.
“Dean!” yells Sam, already running. He knocks down a couple of the bone-sculptures in his hurry, and doesn't stop to right them. “Dean!”
He pushes through the heavy wooden door insulating him from the rest of the Ksar, and down the narrow steps, shouting for his brother all the way, until he finds Dean at the bottom of the stairs in the main hall, half-eaten dinner in his hand.
“What? Sammy, what?”
Sam doesn't stop to explain, he doesn't think he can explain, he just grabs Dean's jacket and yanks him out the door, into the icy desert night.
OOO
Dean doesn't know what's going on, except that he's racing down the path that leads to the bottom of the mountain with Sam. Sam is dragging him down it. He hopes this isn't some kind of mad sprint towards a phantom or a hallucination: they've already been through all that shit once, and Dean doesn't think he can stand to--
“Cas?!”
What? “Sam, what's -”
“Castiel!”
Sam lets go of Dean and runs a few more steps, then drops to his knees on the ground. Dean follows him, wary, unwilling to hope, sure that this is just Sam's crazy acting up.
But the crazy person is right this time. It's their angel.
“Fuck.” Dean fumbles in his jacket and produces a flashlight.
“Angel down,” mutters Sam, looking up at Dean. In the narrow light beam, he looks like he's going to flip out.
“Angel down,” Dean agrees, as the light illuminates Cas, his tattered trench-coat and bruised face, his bare and bloodied feet. His eyes are closed. Dean's mind starts working at warp-speed then, throwing explanations at him, reasons, motivations. He grits his teeth, tries to stop his heart from going a hundred miles a second. “Cas? Castiel, can you hear me, man?”
“No ringing, no angel,” says Sam, speculatively, “Why does it not ring, Dean?”
He clenches his fist, wrings his arms, looks longingly back at the Ksar. Dean can tell that this is probably too much for him. The Grace isn't killing him anymore, but the continuous visions, the thing he has with the walls and the stones and the memories attached to them, and the panic attacks--it's overwhelming. He can't add Cas to the equation without falling apart.
“Dude, I need you to hold on just a while longer.”
“Yeah. Yeah, okay. I'm fine,” Sam lets out his breath in a whoosh. “We need to take him inside.”
“What did he do,” Dean wonders, as they carry Cas up the path, “walk all the way?”
OOO
In the end, it's Sam who actually keeps it together.
Down in the courtyard, the monsters sense the newcomer and makes a ruckus. It's an unholy orchestra of growling and screeching, sibilant hissing, and Dean can barely hear his own thoughts over the melee.
“I'm going to go,” says Sam, soon as they get Cas to their room, “quiet them down.”
And miraculously, a few minutes later, the noise dies down. Dean doesn't even get it. All those weird, crazy malformed things loves Sammy. They sense his bad days and tones down their volume accordingly. They listen to him. They help him plant flowers. He gives them names. Dean just doesn't get it.
And then Sam comes back and upends half a pitcher of water over Castiel, and Dean, who's been standing there blinking at the angel's inert form, lets out a startled, “Sam!” . His brother just shrugs as Cas splutters and gasps. He sits up, wincing as he places weight on his skinned palms.
“You dumb son of a bitch, what did you do to yourself?!” It's Sam who asks the question, jovially, as if he's talking to a child that's just climbed out of a mud pond.
“There was a plane,” Cas says, his eyes flitting to a glowering Dean for a second before he peers at Sam, “and it crashed, and… you're all wrong, Sam. You heard me. Before. I heard you.”
Dean waves a frustrated arm and moves to eclipse Sam. “Okay, that's great and all--you guys can have your Shining moment later, can we please get to business?”
Cas looks at him, rubs at a bruise on his cheek. “What do you want to know, Dean?”
Dean snorts. “Okay, then. How about, everything? Start at this, man, where the hell have you been? And I swear to God, if you say you were chumming with Metatron up in the Pearlies…”
“I was not chumming with Metatron up in Heaven, Metatron doesn't need friends, Dean, Metatron doesn't need anyone--”
“Then where? Trick-or-treating human souls? Trying to get the gates open again? 'Cause I put a hunter APB on you before we came here, told every fucking guy I know to keep a look out for you, and it's been four months since anyone's seen you,” says Dean, slamming a hand on the table. His head rings with questions, anger and concern battles for dominion in his head, and he wants to break something.
“I have a price on my head, Dean,” says Castiel, his voice dangerously low, “I was lying low. And looking for you. In case you haven't realized it, the two of you have been difficult to find!”
“How did you find us anyway?” asks Sam, his tone mollifying.
Cas's eyes narrow as he looks at Sam. “There was- an equation. I may be human now, but I still have my memories. It took a while to compute, there were a few surds that wouldn't cancel out, and one logarithm that took a week, but I was able to figure out the general vicinity of your souls-”
“You're human now?” snaps Dean, throwing Sam a don't make him start look.
“Yes, Metatron took my Grace. That was- that was the last part of the spell.”
“The spell that broke heaven,” Dean states, coldly, hands fisting over his knees.
Cas sighs. “Yes, Dean, the spell that broke heaven. I didn't know. I was trying to fix it.”
Dean smiles, deprecatively. “Jeez, Cas. Maybe you should stop trying to fix anything, seeing as all you end up doing is break it.”
Silence, of the barbed, electric kind, but then Cas says, “I know you're angry with me, Dean. But I need your help.”
“Help with what?” snaps Dean. “Because the last time you asked for my help--”
Cas takes a deep breath and cuts him short. “I know how to get into heaven, Dean. But I need both of you to help me open a portal.”
OOO
“These flowers,” Castiel says, making Sam jump and wince. “They're not normal.”
Sam looks at them. They're a deep shade of orange, with veins of a deep cobalt blue running through the petals. “No,” he says, simply, pushing his hair away from his eyes. Cas stands at the door, and Sam thinks he looks like he went twelve rounds with a freight train.
“But you like it here.”
Sam sits down at the edge of the roof, and Castiel follows suit. “I guess. It's nice enough. It's far from crowds, so there's less chance of me running into an angel.”
“What happens if you do?”
Sam makes a face. “Well, it's kind of like bells, you know. Loud, annoying, ridiculous. The way angels are in general. And then I feel like…like I want to go home. Like I've been uprooted from something I took for granted all these years, and like I'll die a thousand times to regain it. Like I'd give anything for it. Everything.”
Cas looks out into the darkness, saying nothing. Sam wonders at him, at the screeching grey panic he's reining in, and smiles, introspective. “Funny thing is that it's so human. That feeling. Sometimes I think that's exactly how Dean feels too. It's silly, isn't it? Missing a different sky. Missing different stars. Thinking they were probably better aligned back home. Missing a car, and greasy burger joints, and an underground bunker with spiders in the walls. Home is all that everyone wants.”
Cas meets his eyes. “If you go back home though, you'll never stop running, Sam. They're looking for you. Dean told me about the deal you took with Abbadon. She won't be very happy if you break it.”
Sam studies him, intently. “And if your plan works, and you get into heaven, it's probably suicide. But you still want to try, don't you, Cas? For your brothers and sisters. For family. You'll try to make it work.”
Castiel looks at Sam's flowers, at the bleached bones they crush as they grow. At the secret growing in their cobalt-blue veined orange petals, nearly ready to spill.
“Wouldn't anyone?” he mutters, and Sam smiles.
OOO
A slash in the sky.
That's what the portal is, much like the one in Purgatory though not glowy yet, and it's barely the span of an angel's wing.
Cas says he can't explain what it's doing in that particular geographic location without going into the metaphysical nature of String Theory, or some bullshit like that. Sam says he thinks there are portals all over, that Castiel was just trying to find them before he went ahead with his plan. Dean refuses to say anything about any of this because he's sure his brain is likely to explode from all that he's doing, all that he's not doing, and all the crap other supernatural pieces of crap are doing to his world.
The three of them stand atop the ruins of an old castle. This region is studded with these buildings, these echoes of multicolored pasts, and all of them resonate with memories that refuse to be obliterated with time.
The wind is strong, dusty; it blows Sam's hair around his face like he's in page two-hundred of some Mills and Boons novel. Dean smirks even through the nervousness that all this brings. He looks at his brother and Cas, looking over the spell now, going through the finer aspects of Enochian pronunciation. He fingers the angel blade in his jacket, and heaves a sigh.
Sam turns to him. “The ambergris, Dean,” he says.
Dean hands him the bag of intestinal whale glop. The spell requires strange ingredients, but this is a strange land. A land that believes in magic, in demons, with no past grief or present proof necessary. It wasn't too hard gathering up myrrh, vetiver or the Five Herbs of Conflict.
He lights a match and drops it into the silver bowl that Sam holds out.
“Heaven is hard to navigate, but you already know that. Have to find the yellow-brick road and all, as your saying goes,” says Cas, with a faltering half-smile. “I'm human now, I can slip in through here without Metatron noticing it, unlike the other angels who kept their Grace when they fell, but I can't guarantee that I'll slip out. But I'll try. If I don't find him in two months, I'll try and get out,” Cas pauses, and then says, in a quiet voice, “I'm trying to make things right. Sometimes it doesn't look like it, but that's all I'm trying to do, Dean.”
Dean watches him, unblinking. “Are you sure about this, Cas? I'm all for action too, but there are holes of such size in your plan that the Impala can drive through them, and from where I am, all this looks like is suicide.”
Cas gives a half-shrug. “I need to do this because of the same reason Sam got Lucifer to jump into the Cage. The same reason you never stopped trying to get out of Purgatory. Because I have to, Dean. There's no other way.”
“Then maybe you should hold onto this.”
Castiel takes the angel blade from him. The sun glints off it, glints on all their faces. Dean looks away.
Sam gets the Enochian right in one go, and stands back as the wind gets stronger. It howls around them all, and then the actual slash appears in the sky, a seam tearing open and light flooding through.
Dean stumbles back as a pillar of light falls onto the rooftop, keeping one hand on Sam's jacket, the other pressed against his brow to shield his eyes from the light. Cas steps into the pillar of light, and through the last few words that Sam speaks, through the hiss and crackle of the lilac flame dying in the bowl in his hand, through the screaming wind, Dean thinks he hears Cas say, “In two months. Look for me in Vermont.”
And then he's gone, the light sucked away, the seam in the sky re-stitching itself into the clear cornflower blue of the Middle East.
OOO
Sam is gone the moment they arrive back, into the sheltered comfort of his garden, and Dean watches a few monsters jabber among themselves for some time--it's entertaining enough-- before he starts wondering about Vermont.
About how Sam, a step in front of him, had nodded without question or confusion.
He climbs the stairs, goes first to their room where he finds John Winchester's journal on his bed. It's been touched recently, the clip holding it together placed higher, a pen wedged between two pages near the end. Where he'd written down Abbadon's spell to open portals to far places (with “beats flights” in the margin)--the same one, in fact, that Henry had used to come to their time, except modified to lead them here--Sam has added something extra in his hand.
More Enochian.
Dean closes the journal and makes his way to the garden.
Sam doesn't seem surprised to see him. In fact, even before Dean actually pushes open the door, he hears Sam say, “Dean, come in here and look.”
The garden is glowing. Dean's taken aback for a moment, because glowing flowers, what the hell but then he sees the color, the gleam, and it's cobalt blue. And it drips. Like ink, over the edges of the petals, into tiny bottles.
“I figured,” says Sam, “that I could try and brew the antidote myself. Apparently I have a green touch.”
“Your antidote is made from bone-fed flowers? Seriously?”
“It's a spell and every spell has ingredients, Dean. You sow the right seed, you reap the right crop.”
“And the Enochian in here?” asks Dean, raising John's journal.
“That was Castiel. Gave me the shortest route to Vermont.”
Dean swallows. Looks at the flowers, at the bottles, at his brother. The ache in his chest is probably a combination of two things: the fact that Sam had been trying, all along, trying so hard even though Dean knew he'd kind of settled down to the easy routine of this, and something else, something that flickers, something that prods at the back of his mind without him being able to quite grasp what it is.
“I really don't hate it here that much, Sammy. It's…fine.”
“You wouldn't want to go back home if you had the chance?” asks Sam, feverishly, a grin sparking at his lips. “I can do this, Dean. Screw Abbadon, she has enough monsters. If she comes after us, she's just another problem. Don't tell me you don't wanna take the tarp off the Impala and make it harder on the angels.”
It's like something in Dean breaks, or maybe something thaws, and he thinks the roiling, flickering feeling that he can't name must be hope?
“I do, you know I do, hell, I'd give my soul to grab a fucking beer with you when I feel like it, drive a little over the limit and play REO Speedwagon when I'm in the mood, but--”
“This is the way out, Dean. This is one problem I can make disappear. No easy fix-its that'll come back to bite, no double-edged crap hanging over our heads. This is something I figured out, something that I can do. I can handle the past-visions and the memory thing, I'll wear earmuffs to tune out the ringing if I have to. Maybe this, this could even be a good thing. You just let me do this, Dean, for both of us. Let me get us home.”
Dean feels like they're at the cusp of something important: the road back to the easy, beautiful familial sameness that feels like it has been lost for years. So much that passes between them is unsaid, has always been, but in this silence is a new kind of peace.
Dean says, “Dude, I'll have to play my tunes extra loud to drown out your crazy.”
Sam shrugs, looks at the brown expanse around them and says, wistfully, “I hope we have a white Christmas.”